Raised to a life of relentless hard work as one of seven children of a single mother, Julie Waterman was married and having her own first child by the time she was 17. At 23 she was running her own cleaning company, making such a success of it that she was soon employing 400 people. But at 35 she gave it all up to buy a second-hand yacht and embarked on the biggest adventure of all - an attempt to sail single-handed round the world. There were parties in every port, along with a string of romances, some hilarious adventures and several narrow escapes from a watery grave. But Julie stuck to her plan - until a tropical storm left her shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific, where she lived for three glorious years, falling in love with a handsome young French diplomat. Unfortunately her new paramour turned out not to be all he seemed - and Julie's round-the-world adventure was far from over. Shipwrecked in Paradise is the story of Julie Waterman's remarkable voyage across the world, complete with laughter, lovers, maritime mishaps, port parties and pink gins

Winner, 2016 Secretary's Research Award, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution - awarded for author's contributions to research The first oceangoing yacht ever built in America, Cleopatra’s Barge, endured many incarnations over her eight-year life, from Mediterranean pleasure cruiser to a Hawaiian king’s personal yacht. The famed ship, at times also a Christian missionary transport, pirate ship, getaway vehicle, instrument of diplomacy, and racing yacht, wrecked on a reef in Hanalei Bay on April 6, 1824. Obtaining the first underwater archaeological permits ever issued by the state of Hawai‘i, a team of divers from the Smithsonian Institution located, surveyed, and excavated the wrecked ship from 1995 to 2000. The 1,250 lots of artifacts from the shipwreck represent the only known material culture from the reign of King Kamehameha II (Liholiho), shedding light on the little-documented transitional period from Old Hawai‘i to foreign influence and culture. Although Liholiho ruled Hawai‘i for only a few short years, his abolition of taboos and admission of the Boston Christian missionaries into his kingdom planted the seeds for profound changes in Hawaiian culture. Richly illustrated, Shipwrecked in Paradise tells the story of the ship’s life in Hawai‘i, from her 1820 sale to Liholiho to her discovery and excavation.

Four thousand years of shipwrecks in literature and film

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.